Magickal Realism

The people at Mayo Clinic decided that if I was well enough to mention Geneva convention laws, I was well enough to have a computer and what amounts to a vacuum sealed room. They’re leaving me trays of food, but nothing smells appetizing - and relax, no one smells appetizing. My stomach was pumped…more humiliation for the day… and while my blood is holding steadily at midpoint, my cravings for organ meat are subsiding. But seriously, why had no one tried biting a zombie back besides me? If you’re really infected, you’re screwed anyway, and at least you have the satisfaction of the confused expression that only a cadaver can have.

Joel remembers everything now, and he’s really, really pissed, but he says he’s going to forgive me, he just needs a proper night’s sleep and more perspective.

Dr. Z is going around waving his hand in front of nurses and the extremely tired, trying to get someone to talk on my behalf. At this point, I’m half-expecting him to take over someone while sleeping. Possession: nine tenths of metaphysical law.

I’m on quarantine, either until I die of starvation or until they actually diagnose whatever this cha cha my blood is doing. This leaves me with nothing to do but meditate, let people stick needles in me, pretend I’m Hannibal Lecter (my Halloween costume is all picked out) and look at a LOT of porn.

It’s gonna be a long year.

So, I’m now locked in a room on the top floor of Abbot Northwestern. I had a bit of a … lapse. I was hungry. There was a disembodied head. I ate it while it cursed at me.

I don’t want to eat anybody else’s brain. I just have a taste for zombies now. It’s like they’re finely aged, like a good, stinky Lindbergh cheese. And now, fast or slow, when I walk towards the body parts, they run away. I’ve taken my revenge on that disembodies foot that kicked me. I’m pretty sure that this “perky” feeling I’m experiencing is actually wanting to hunt. I want to hunt dead things.

Only the ghost doctor feels safe with me, but since only I can see him I can’t really use him to communicate with others. I could tell him how to take possession of Joel, but that won’t do much. The mortuary life doctor has summoned a medical helicopter and we’re heading to Mayo Clinic soon; I’ve agreed to let them strap me down and wear a mouth guard in case I want to bite someone else.

I’m pretty sure this is the last time I’ll have on a computer for a very, very long time.

The ghost is a man named Doctor Z. I like him. I always like ghosts. They make more sense to me than the living. But now I’m an extra sad, a different sad as things run out of my body in the most public humiliation I’ve had since junior high.

There aren’t many souls left. The slow zombies, they have no souls. The souls are off in a bottle somewhere. The fast zombies, they’re trapped inside themselves. Somehow that’s worse.

And Joel is almost satisfied that a barium enema on a roof top is almost sufficient punishment for routinely drugging him for the past year. Almost. But at least he doesn’t want to shoot me in the head anymore.

I feel more like myself than I have in the past year. Like I could start cracking jokes. Or cracking heads. God, I could go for some meat, that zombie head looks kind of tasty. Not the human heads, just the zombie head.

Joel has reassured me that, after everything I’ve done to and for him this year, he would be quite pleased to have the honor of shooting me in the head if it becomes necessary. I had to prod very insistently for the “only if it’s necessary” clause.

So, before we engage in the procedure, the ghost doc and one of the living docs and I have agreed that there’s a whole bunch of stuff I need to make public record, things I’ve kept locked down since last year. The world needs to know what happened to Pete, where the zombies went, what happened to me…

Being given the zombie repellent formula was less of an accident than originally thought. The Haitian I used to buy my vetiver from had tracked me down specifically, though I didn’t know it at the time. He had often told me if I weren’t so scattered and American I’d make a great houngan, and he had been transferring that information to me in bits and pieces, in interesting conversations couched in flirtation so I wouldn’t realize I was being taught. My grasp of the occult is much like other people’s grasp of mathematics: I just happen to be really good at it. He was so good at it he was being tracked by the Vatican and the Vatican was being tracked by the HSA, and in the mix I wound up being tracked, especially after last year’s trial for pitching a priest off a building.¹

Here’s something no one really talked about: those zombies that didn’t get hacked to bits, they were still around on June 14th last year. Mike was one of them, and since his family was completely unprepared for zombie care, it fell to me. Although Pete and Vatican personnel offered me a nice safe place in the Alps, I said no - first, because I really don’t want to have “convert to Catholicism” conversations every day for the rest of my life, second because I’d like to have sex again someday, and third because I refuse to live anywhere I can’t have a pizza delivered without paying for airfare.
So, since Joel’s family was decimated and he was one of my only close friends who had experienced serious loss, we found a place we could afford in Minneapolis that was basically in the ‘hood and settled in together. We tied up Mike in the backyard Shaun of the Dead style, and tried to go about rebuilding our lives.

And I started getting sick, sicker than I ever was before the last apocalypse. I was staggering across the street daily for anti-nausea medications, Vicodin, Percoset, anything to numb my head. Then, just before Thanksgiving, Pete showed up.

There are two things I can be assured of after Pete’s visit: bad sex really is worse than no sex, and don’t leave your new lover in the backyard alone with your zombie boyfriend. Apparently zombies are conscious enough to get jealous. Ultimately, I had to shoot them both and bury them in the backyard. I also dosed Joel for the first time that day - at this point, he’s remembering many incidents that now qualify me as a serial killer. It changes his view of me as a moral compass for the both of us, and it makes me sad, but I really thought he was better off not knowing how we were really living.

It seems that something had happened to Pete before he ever got exposed to Mike - something that worked differently than the whole undead metaphysical fiasco of 2007. I’m not sure I fully understand the details, but within a month I was swarmed by Homeland Security Agents who knew damn well I’d hidden Pete’s body and were more concerned that I’d slept with him than that I’d killed him. Apparently I’d saved them the hassle of doing it themselves. I got dragged in for testing, and Joel got dosed again. Now that I think about it, I should tell Joel to get checked out for organ damage.

Although no bodily fluids were exchanged, etheric fluids are always exchanged during sex and there is no contraceptive for that. Whatever Pete carried, I now have, buried in my aura and battling with my blood. For some reason, the same thing that would make me a good houngan makes me an especially dangerous carrier of this infection. One tip of the virus in the wrong direction, and suddenly I’m leading the brains brigade. Since I’m a carrier for both fast zombie and slow zombie, the results would be particularly unpredictable. We’ve suppressed it by suppressing my physical and psychic immune system: they are connected, and they are weak.

The doctors are going to flush my system (yeah, this will be humiliating on the roof and nowhere near a toilet) and we’re going to get the drugs out of me and turn my metaphysical self loose. God, I hope I don’t have to kill anymore people - at least, not today.

I started getting even sicker after that, and showing bizarre symptoms: wild needs for raw meat and fresh organs, a distaste for my own formulas. I had to force myself to touch rock salt, and I have to make Joel handle the aesfotida.

1. If I’d pitched off a homeless person, no one would have cared. But slap a white collar and a cross on a guy and people get all upset. [↩]

Opening the file, and reading - after all those pokes, and prods, and needles:
Results Are Inconclusive.
The ghost doctor was the expert, the disembodied head was his assistant, and he’s pretty sure the reason they got nailed with the zombie-virus first is because of my tests. So the question is: do I reopen the psychic channels and risk the possibility of becoming the Pied Piper of the Undead very quickly, or do I stay on shut down, physically and psychically weakened, to slow what might be the inevitable anyway?

Decisions suck. At least this time I can shoot someone.

Since this morning Joel and I have managed to cross the street, work our way through the hospital, and found our way to the roof. There are five doctors up there, three living, two dead, all conscious, one a ghost and one a disembodied zombie head that the “expert in mortuary health” insists upon keeping. I haven’t been able to see a ghost since last year, since the ritual that is now leeching my red blood cells also blocks my psychic channels. I can’t fathom how I can see him. I have my mini-laptop up here and the wireless access is solid; we’re in contact with other doctors on the roofs of other hospitals in the city, and we’ve been passing around the Zombie Repellent like sunscreen while mortuary science guy asks me incredibly dumb questions about mystic applications and why the hell I’ve been living the way I have been, as though it’s his business.

Getting through the hospital was…weird. There’s a new breed of zombies on the loose, fast ones. I don’t like fast ones. That said, that isn’t what we found in the hospital. I can’t say we actually found zombies…we found pieces of them…very active pieces of them. It was like someone was holding an audition for the Thing in the next Addam’s family remake. I stepped up on a loose hand going up the stairs, and two flights up got kicked in the shins by a disembodies leg, ostensibly for stepping on the hand.

I would have preferred to head straight to the roof, but Joel insisted we make our way into the lab and get my test results. He doesn’t know that what I’m being treated for is zombie-related, he just knows it’s autoimmune. But by his logic, now is as good a time as any for me to stock up on medications. The boy is thinking like a looter already. I am a terrible influence.

He’s actually been getting crankier with me, today. He’s informed me I have some ’splainin to do, because of course, today of all days his neurons reassert themselves into normal memory patterns and I think he knows I’ve been drugging him.

Joel’s method for testing me for “zombie creep” was to dump a bottle of Zombie Repellent over my head and ask me if I felt depressed. Not a great test, as I’ve been depressed for the past year. Of course, now that homicidal rage is a symptom… Come to think of it, that’s not a very Joel thing to do.

I swear, if that mortuary science jackass makes one more stupid comment about me I’m going to arrange for that disembodied head to bite him in the ass and then eat his brains myself.

Zombies, in fact, are quite real. A practice originated in Haiti and now carried out in other parts of the Caribbean as one of the consequences of diaspora, zombification is quite arguably a fate worse than death. It is, in Bizango¹ society, a way of handling criminals. If we didn’t have that pesky “cruel and unusual punishment” clause in our Constitution, you can be sure government would look into its application to highly recidivistic criminals. I’m positive that more than one world military has actually looked into this possibility of a sort of processed zombification - it would be quite the diplomatic work around to zombify troublesome international leaders, rather than killing them outright.

A book review of Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie explores loosely the ethnobiological possibilities of zombification. Initially it was believed to come from a toxin inherent in puffer-fish. However, given the actual effects of scopolamine - watch this documentary on it - I suspect perhaps that Devil’s Weed was the drug actually used, possibly in combination with other drugs, but that hell was going to freeze over before it was handed off to someone researching and publishing a how-to on zombification.

Years ago I watched or read a National Geographic documentary about a village in Africa where zombification was a rampant problem; it belies the things I’m finding online about zombies being “rare.” There were several images of real live zombies - zombies that had been returned to families. All too often young girls were zombified to cover up a rape, and there was a neurologist in the US who had made a major breakthrough in getting the zombies to lift their heads and to respond to their own names. I can’t find that particular piece of information anywhere, unfortunately. If someone spots it, let me know.

1. Bizango is an underground Haitian cult. There is very little published on them. [↩]

Joel called me up on the roof about half an hour ago. Our neighborhood is still a ghost town - I can see people shuffling, and I can smell burning. It looks like the US Bank Building is up in flames. So much for that property sale. What’s getting me is the absolute blackness of Abbott Northwestern Hospital across the street. The windows are dark. On the upper levels, I can see some attempts to barricade the windows, and I wonder if the helicopter masked their sound last night.

I don’t need to check the news, I know what this means. I do, however, wish I’d bought some binoculars. Some doctors and nurses could be up on the roof, and today was the day that I was supposed to get my test results. I need to know if I’m a carrier, because if I am, Joel is in trouble.

OK, before I shoot a helicopter pilot in the face, I really really should make sure said pilot shuts OFF the helicopter first. By now the battery has worn out or whatever, and I’m amazed that mine was the only gun fired, especially given the noise. When you live on this part of Chicago Avenue, you get used to helicopters being target practice. This is mostly because heavily armed drug dealers live along this block, and they tend to be heavily armed and extremely cranky when stirred from slumber. They’ve shot in my yard before, but to their credit, they don’t generally shoot at me. One of the nurses at the hospital told me they were afraid while we were chatting over some blood tests. I couldn’t get that nurse to fill in more details - I saw her look at my blood, turn white, and disappear.

It’s not the first time a helicopter landed here since I’ve lived here; once, it was the Vatican, returning my stuff including what I needed to make the Zombie Repellent. Once, it was Pete. I try not to think anymore about Pete.

As for today, our back garden should be riddled with bullets - it’s not. Except for the dead man decomposing face down in the tomatoes, it’s like we’re the only people around here.

Joel just brought in the newspaper - it’s a civility he insisted on when we moved in together, I suspect more to try to re-socialize me than to try to stay informed. It looks like the paper was torn into, savagely. And dripping with something like saliva. Joel was holding it by the barest piece of newsprint, possibly the only dry spot on it, and allowing it to drip onto the wooden floor. It was gross. He’s tossed it out back on top of the dead man. I’d think he was being callous, if I hadn’t dosed him with scopolamine. I know it’s a horrible thing to do to a dear friend, but I have to - for his sake. The things I do on a daily basis since last year are horrible, and just because I’ve been warped into a feral version of myself doesn’t mean Joel needs to be. The repellent thing has made me kind of underground famous. Poor Joel. He lives with the Zombie Queen, as one of the more sensitive editors of the City Pages dubbed me.

I went to stick my head out the front door, and our neighborhood, usually violent and noisy, is ghost-like. There’s no one in the Abbott-Northwestern parking lot, and the lights are off. I better check the news to see if there was a power outage or worse, a hostage situation.

Gawd, the air smells putrid today. I should check the smog index. It can’t be the guy I shot - nothing rots that fast, especially since it’s not really humid today.

I’m hoping my paranoia comes to naught, but since I can’t bring myself to watch the news - PTSD, say my doctors, as is the fatigue - I’m sitting here thinking about last year. Thinking about, early in the day, when I thought the situation was funny as zombies tried to climb the window and get at me. When I still had the man I loved. When I didn’t know the so-called secrets of the universe (Kung Fu Panda just about sums it up.)

One of the concepts I explored between my first and second degrees in witchcraft was the possibility of alternate realities, and I use that possibility to comfort myself now. In another scenario, the zombie never happened. Mike never got bit on the head because one of Honeywell’s security issues went wrong. Zombification is still nothing more than a ritual practice of inflicting neural damage that is absolutely non-contagious.

In that other dimension, Mike and I are still living happily together. He’s finally closing in on his PhD and I’m teasing him about his “deadline” to propose to me. I’ve had sufficient time to resolve any doubts about the relationship. Our apartment may be a nightmare, and my friends and I meet and drink and have our little dramas and laughs, but there is no mystical bullshit, just the steady comfort of my religious and creative practice. I do not have to deal with check-ins from a Vatican representative and I wasn’t tried and acquitted for killing a priest although the Vatican ruled he was not a zombie, despite the corpse attempting to sit up several times during the autopsy. None of my Etsy orders involved me opening an envelope to unload a human foot and middle finger. In this other place, my life is still one of quiet business-building, expanding on my writing career and one where I can usually sleep through the night.

But I’m not in that other place, right now, I’m here. And I’m sad. I’m not going to unload on Joel about this, I’m just going to sit at the computer, shotgun across my lap…

And wonder why the hell there’s a helicopter landing in our backyard.